On Art Experience

Invest in the living artist. Buy their work, meet them in their studios if you can. The dead ones? They're gone, whether they suffered in poverty or luxuriated in riches. If their foundations truly want to be remembered, they should advance art by supporting the young and emerging artists. Art events should not be mere displays of vanity; they should be serious and potent spaces for birthing societal and linguistic utterances from onlookers.

As the art critic Roberta Smith aptly put it, "Artists don't own the meaning of their work." But let's take it further: critics, dealers, managers, curators, and historians don't own the interpretation either. The onlookers, from all classes and walks of life, generate meanings, or at least allude to the expressions they witness in the artwork.

We should not spoon-feed 'ready-made experiences' to onlookers. Let the murderer see the cries in it, the saints see the meditation, the cooks smell the flavors, the lyricists read them as prose, and the blind receive more than one sensory experience. If necessary, let's burn the piles of old artworks to fuel future creatives. Let's not confine art to boxes, templates, theories, and frameworks. Serve it raw, like a jungle. The fetish for preservation, like a French garden, is drying up the potent soil of the art ecosystem.